A Wordle Strategy

Last year, I blogged about Wordle and its spinoffs. This "guess a 5-letter word in six tries" game is going strong. I just played my 500th tracked game (I wasn't tracking it for the first few months that I played). Today's post is my strategy.

Since you have only six tries in Wordle, it is important to choose words at the beginning that contain vowels and common consonants. Statistically, this will give you a high probability of having most of the letters known (yellow) or locked in (green) after you've guessed three words (that contain varied letters). The question: which words to try?

Here are the three words I choose, in order, 95% of the time, regardless of the green/yellow letter count:

• ALERT
• SOUND
• CHIMP

These three words cover all the vowels (AEIOU) and the most common consonants (RTNSLC, plus DHMP for good measure). No letters are repeated, meaning I've tested 58% of the English alphabet (15/26) as this point.

How does my strategy fare? Decently well:

Through 500 tracked plays, I win 98% of the time, and usually on the fourth word. I very occasionally deviate from my strategy if the first one or two words reveals a sizable portion of the puzzle (I got today's in two tries). But for the most part, I stick with this, and it works.

I have found one problem: I consistently flail on _O_ER words. If that is the pattern, and I've done my typical first three, it means I have three guesses, and the choices are too many. The remaining 11 letters are BFGJKQVWXYZ. Look at all the words _O_ER can be:

• BOXER
• FOYER
• JOKER
• BOWER
• VOWER
• ROWER (I include this because R could appear twice)

There are probably more options. My point: that is more than three, and the first three words have no overlapping letters. I've had more than one streak end due to a _O_ER word. Still, my strategy is successful enough that I'm keeping to it—unless someone shows me a better one.